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Summary: Book 1

The narrator of the Odyssey invokes the
Muse, asking for inspiration as he prepares to tell the story of
Odysseus. The story begins ten years after the end of the Trojan
War, the subject of the Iliad. All of the Greek
heroes except Odysseus have returned home. Odysseus languishes on
the remote island Ogygia with the goddess Calypso, who has fallen
in love with him and refuses to let him leave. Meanwhile, a mob
of suitors is devouring his estate in Ithaca and courting his wife,
Penelope, in hopes of taking over his kingdom. His son, Telemachus,
an infant when Odysseus left but now a young man, is helpless to
stop them. He has resigned himself to the likelihood that his father
is dead.

With the consent of Zeus, Athena travels to Ithaca to
speak with Telemachus. Assuming the form of Odysseus’s old friend
Mentes, Athena predicts that Odysseus is still alive and that he
will soon return to Ithaca. She advises Telemachus to call together
the suitors and announce their banishment from his father’s estate.
She then tells him that he must make a journey to Pylos and Sparta
to ask for any news of his father. After this conversation, Telemachus
encounters Penelope in the suitors’ quarters, upset over a song
that the court bard is singing. Like Homer with the Iliad, the
bard sings of the sufferings experienced by the Greeks on their
return from Troy, and his song makes the bereaved Penelope more
miserable than she already is. To Penelope’s surprise, Telemachus
rebukes her. He reminds her that Odysseus isn’t the only Greek to
not return from Troy and that, if she doesn’t like the music in
the men’s quarters, she should retire to her own chamber and let
him look after her interests among the suitors. He then gives the
suitors notice that he will hold an assembly the next day at which
they will be ordered to leave his father’s estate. Antinous and
Eurymachus, two particularly defiant suitors, rebuke Telemachus
and ask the identity of the visitor with whom he has just been speaking.
Although Telemachus suspects that his visitor was a goddess in disguise,
he tells them only that the man was a friend of his father.

Summary: Book 2

When the assembly meets the next day, Aegyptius, a wise
Ithacan elder, speaks first. He praises Telemachus for stepping
into his father’s shoes, noting that this occasion marks the first
time that the assembly has been called since Odysseus left. Telemachus
then gives an impassioned speech in which he laments the loss of
both his father and his father’s home—his mother’s suitors, the
sons of Ithaca’s elders, have taken it over. He rebukes them for
consuming his father’s oxen and sheep as they pursue their courtship
day in and day out when any decent man would simply go to Penelope’s
father, Icarius, and ask him for her hand in marriage.

Antinous blames the impasse on Penelope, who, he says,
seduces every suitor but will commit to none of them. He reminds
the suitors of a ruse that she concocted to put off remarrying:
Penelope maintained that she would choose a husband as soon as she
finished weaving a burial shroud for her elderly father-in-law,
Laertes. But each night, she carefully undid the knitting that she
had completed during the day, so that the shroud would never be
finished. If Penelope can make no decision, Antinous declares, then
she should be sent back to Icarius so that he can choose
a new husband for her. The dutiful Telemachus refuses to throw his
mother out and calls upon the gods to punish the suitors. At that
moment, a pair of eagles, locked in combat, appears overhead. The
soothsayer Halitherses interprets their struggle as a portent of
Odysseus’s imminent return and warns the suitors that they will
face a massacre if they don’t leave. The suitors balk at such foolishness,
and the meeting ends in deadlock.

As Telemachus is preparing for his trip to Pylos and Sparta,
Athena visits him again, this time disguised as Mentor, another
old friend of Odysseus. She encourages him and predicts that his
journey will be fruitful. She then sets out to town and, assuming
the disguise of Telemachus himself, collects a loyal crew to man
his ship. Telemachus himself tells none of the household servants
of his trip for fear that his departure will upset his mother. He
tells only Eurycleia, his wise and aged nurse. She pleads with him
not to take to the open sea as his father did, but he puts her fears
to rest by saying that he knows that a god is at his side.

Analysis: Books 1–2

The Odyssey is an epic journey, but the
word journey must be broadly understood. The epic focuses, of
course, on Odysseus’s nostos (“return home” or “homeward voyage”),
a journey whose details a Greek audience would already know because
of their rich oral mythic tradition. But Odysseus’s return is not
the only journey in the Odyssey, nor is it the
one with which the story begins. After the opening passages, which
explain Odysseus’s situation, the focus shifts to the predicament
of Odysseus’s son, Telemachus. He finds himself coming of age in
a household usurped by his mother’s suitors, and it is he who, with
the support of Athena and the other gods, must step into the role
of household master that his father left vacant nearly twenty years
earlier. Thus, in addition to a physical journey to Pylos and Sparta
to learn more about his father’s fate, Telemachus embarks upon a
metaphorical journey into manhood to preserve his father’s estate.